I believe I have followed all the step: prepared train and eval annotation json files and commenting parts of constants.py
I realized that this constants.py will not be picked up when I run openpifpaf.train from the command line, so I created a short train.py file with this code:
##### train.py #####
import openpifpaf
import os
# this is the local constant.py where I have commented out unnecessary code
import constants
# here I am overriding constants in the package
openpifpaf.plugins.wholebody.constants = constants
# here I am calling openpifpaf.train as a shell command since I couldn't figure out how to call it within python directly
os.system('python -m openpifpaf.train --lr=0.0001 --momentum=0.95 --b-scale=3.0 --epochs=150 --lr-decay 130 140 --lr-decay-epochs=10 --batch-size=16 --weight-decay=1e-5 --dataset=wholebody --wholebody-upsample=2 --basenet=shufflenetv2k16 --loader-workers=16 --wholebody-train-annotations=./superform_wholebody_train.json --wholebody-val-annotations=./superform_wholebody_val.json --wholebody-train-image-dir=./train2017/ --wholebody-val-image-dir=./val2017/')
#################
There might be a bug somewhere and/or the documentation needs to be updated.